Equipment and procedures for microwave nondestructive evaluation of lapideous materials

A procedure for in-field nondestructive evaluation of lapideous materials is described. A portable instrument has been developed to evaluate the average permittivity of the probed volume. This is based on measuring the resonance frequency of a microstrip patch sensor. Once this hardware is enabled to perform coherent measurements, the optimization of an edge-preserving energy functional can yield high-resolution permittivity range profiles.